Ruckersville: A Huguenot Family's Virginia Footprint

Ruckersville is a small crossroads community in Greene County, Virginia, and its name tells a story that begins in France. The Rucker family were Huguenots, French Protestants who fled religious persecution after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in sixteen eighty-five. Peter Rucker crossed the Atlantic and settled in colonial Virginia. His descendants spread west along the Piedmont frontier.

Captain John Rucker helped choose the site for Saint Mark's Parish Church in seventeen thirty-two. His nephew John Rucker, a descendant of Peter, later named the village for him, and it took the family name. Greene County itself was not formed until eighteen thirty-eight, carved from the western portion of Orange County.

The community sits on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge, at the point where the mountains begin to flatten into the Piedmont. For travelers heading west on Route Thirty-Three, Ruckersville marks the transition zone where the road begins its climb toward Swift Run Gap and the Shenandoah Valley beyond. The Rucker family name has been on this landscape for nearly three hundred years.